Overcoming the technophilia/technophobia split in environmental discourse

Abstract

The environmental discourse has long been split in two camps: one technophilic, the other technosceptic. The former suggests that technical solutions are the primary fix to environmental problems, while the latter favours changes in behaviour over technological remedies. We explore the structure of this discourse by examining the arguments of each camp and their sub-groups along with their respective shortcomings. We also highlight approaches that go beyond this bipolarity and promise practical advances towards more effective interventions. The investigation extends to an analysis of the reasons why such novel and more sophisticated approaches suffer from a frustratingly low level of uptake in the public and private sectors. Among the obstacles identified are ontological differences, institutional structures, economic incentives and issues around complexity and governance.

Environmental Sustainability: A Case of Policy Implementation Failure?

“…Second, there were misconceptions about the cause of the environmental issues [48,56,74,91,98,115]. Finally, there were incomplete or low levels of understanding with regards to the anticipated impacts of policies [40,45,79,88,107].…”

“…These included the clash between economic rationalism and environmentalism, as well as the way environmental issues were constructed (as a market failure, for example) [52,58,65,79,80,86,[113][114][115]. The framing of discussion and differences in language used between groups were also found to be impediments [48,65,81,83,107,116].…”

“…The attitudes/ beliefs of the public were found to influence the successful implementation or adoption of sustainable practices [31,51,61,62,69,[77][78][79][80][81]. Social resistance to change was also identified as a significant barrier to policy success [31,80,[82][83][84][85][86].…”

“…The first was the inadequacy or absence of consultation with the affected community [30,41,45,49,56,60,78,79,[81][82][83][84]94,95,98,99,103,110,115,120,122]. The second was a failure to adequately involve the community in the policy process [32,36,57,59,65,73,77,98,104,123].…”

“…Case studies in Finland, Italy, the West Balkans and Australia indicated that failure may result where policies are not well developed, are not implemented fully, are not politically popular, or go against a prevailing political agenda [41,47,48,67,71,74,79,[92][93][94]. Dominant interests, such as extractive industries, may influence what is politically feasible, resulting in a failure to deliver sustainability [41,42,44,46,49,58,60,73,81,93,[95][96][97].…”